


Kallohonka

by Minutia_R



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Carcass Handling, Family, Gen, Magic, Magical Education
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-07 21:13:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8816422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: In which Ensi teaches Lalli the proper way to dismember a beast.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MadameFolie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameFolie/gifts).



> I could not have written this without Laufey sharing her cultural knowledge and personal experiences with me. Thank you so much! <3

The bones of beasts are twisted, sometimes. Soft, spongy, unnaturally flexible. It can be hard to tell what they once were. It can be impossible, and then it’s too late for that particular lost spirit. But there’s no clear line between beast and troll. It takes patience and a steady hand to scrape each bone clean, keen vision and long experience to find their proper place in the pattern, misshapen as they are. It needs the favor of Päivätär, who illuminates all things. Of Tapio and Mielikki, to know their own.

Ensi’s thumbs are beginning to cramp from long work with the knife. They never used to when she was young. The thing that was once a moose lies half-dismembered by her knee, warm and stinking. Behind her, a twig snaps. Neither beast nor troll nor healthy animal. Human. Ensi feels the breath of the wind on her face, the throbbing pulse of the trees around her, and brings to the tip of her tongue the words that will ask wind and trees to chase off any unwanted intruders before they get too close.

She never used to worry, when her children were small. But Juha chose a woman with no immunity to the illness for a lover, and now there are two little ones whose bones might warp and twist like these, and who could never be shown the way to join the herds of Tapio and Mielikki. Humans don’t.

Onni is old enough to be cautious. Onni was born cautious. Tuuri--there must have been children like her once, in the Old World. Born with an instinct for laughter and shouting, a craving for new people and strange places and unfamiliar words. Ensi has no idea how one was born in her time, to her line. If it was Tuuri, her chatter would have given her away long before the snap of a twig did.

Ensi lets the words at the tip of her tongue loose, unspoken. Resumes her work with the knife. Without looking up, she says, “You made a noise. If I were a troll, you would be dead.”

Lalli settles himself in the leaf-litter beside her and darts her a single sidelong glance. The tilt of his eyebrows says, you’re not a troll. The set of his mouth says, you’re talking nonsense.

Well. Fair.

Ensi gives him a tap on the back of the head anyway, for rudeness. And because it doesn’t matter. He shouldn’t have made a noise. This, he accepts. Or he doesn’t care. One or the other. He’s tough, this little one.

Onni tends to cry when corrected. Even now, though he tries to hide it. Ensi leaves his education to Juha, mostly. She doesn’t know how to handle his moods. And half of what she has to teach he can’t use. He will only ever know the edges of the forest. The depths are deadly to him.

Lalli sits and watches for a time, and then Ensi hands him the knife and sees his eyes go wide with awe and pleasure. He knows what an honor he’s being given. Good. If he’s here, he might as well make himself useful and give Ensi’s aching thumbs a break. And it’s time he learned how to use one. Now, when his hands are still weak enough that the leather of his gloves is enough to stop any slip he makes. Nicks and cuts were always a worry when Onni was learning, and now with Tuuri, although her hands are deft enough that they rarely slip. It was only this winter that Ensi showed her how to carve a boat from a scrap of wood for practice. Now her boats with their little birch-bark sails come out perfect every time, and she’s already bored with it. Last month, on a trip to the mainland, she saw a tractor, and she wants to carve that--a shape that wood was never meant to take. She has big ideas, that one. Strange ideas. And when she can’t make them real right away, she grows frustrated. She needs patience and discipline. But Ensi won’t be the one to teach them to her.

Lalli, though--if he happens to cut himself, there’s no harm done, is there? Although the way he’s going about it, he may stab himself in the gut, and that would be beyond Ensi’s ability to heal. She takes his hands and wrists, corrects his grip, moves them for him to show him the proper motion, away from his body. He growls softly, low in his throat. It’s easier the other way. But this way is right.

Satisfied with his form now, she leaves him to it, massaging her hands. He works methodically but slowly, at a fraction of the speed she would, old and tired as she is. The sun won't be down for hours yet. There's no hurry. Lalli scrapes the bones clean, and Ensi sets them in their proper places in the pattern at the foot of the tree. Whenever he hands her one, he waits to see where she puts it before getting back to his work. Once Lalli sees a thing, he remembers it.

Eventually, all the bones are assembled, as many as they can recover. The skull, Ensi cleans herself. The bones are important, each one in its place, so that the animal will remember the shape it once had before the illness twisted it, so that Tapio and Mielikki can recognize what it is. But it’s the skull that houses the animal’s spirit. Where, through the sockets that once held its eyes of flesh, it can still see the way back to its first home. One day Lalli will do this too. For now, he watches.

Ensi’s legs are stiff from too much sitting, and the joints of her shoulders and elbows make their displeasure known when she swings herself onto the lowest branch of the tree. It’s too high for Lalli to reach, but that doesn’t trouble him--his fingers and toes find the smallest cracks in the bark, and he scrambles up after her. In this, Lalli is quick and she is slow. She really is getting old.

This is brought home to her when she’s forced to take a break and lean against the trunk of the tree, a stitch in her side, struggling to catch a proper breath. Lalli appears at her knee. “Let me take it,” he says. “I can carry it higher.”

The skull is heavy for him, sitting awkwardly across his head and shoulders, hanging down his back. If the animal had been older when it sickened--or if it had been a male, with a rack of antlers--he wouldn’t be able to manage it. As it is, it slows him, but doesn’t stop him from continuing up the tree. Ensi watches him overtake her through the few leaves still clinging to the branches in the late fall. He’s right: he can go higher than she could, and not only because of the countless small betrayals her body has worked on her. Branches that would snap if she tried them bear his slighter weight without difficulty. When they start to sway beneath him, he pauses, lifts the skull off his shoulders and settles it against the trunk, facing east, where it can see the rising sun and the stars. Checks to make sure it’s secure. It’s a good place. Maybe the tree told him. It’s borne the skulls of beasts before, and seen them safely to their first home.

There’s only one thing left for Ensi to do. She leans her head back against the bark of the tree, closes her eyes, and says:

Swiftest runner of the forest,  
How could hunters ever catch you?  
How could bullets forged in fire  
Overtake your flashing footfalls?  
It was never I who slew you;  
It was not my sons or grandsons.  
But a sly and unseen sickness  
Borne on winds, breathed in unknowing:  
That’s what warped your bones and sinews  
Drove your thoughts into confusion.  
Look up to the stars in heaven  
See the path that leads you homeward  
Snap the snare that holds your spirit  
Break its iron teeth to splinters.  
Once more may you run unfettered  
With the blessed herds of Tapio  
In the woodlands of Mielikki.

And from above her, Lalli adds:

Tapio of hidden places,  
Good Mielikki of the forests,  
This moose is lost, please bring her comfort.  
Feed her on your sweetest grasses.

Ensi has heard Lalli’s piping voice raised in prayer and song before--it came earlier to him than ordinary words--but this is something new. “Did you hear that somewhere?” she asks. “Or is it yours?”

He only shrugs, not even pausing as he shimmies down the trunk. Ensi doesn’t press. It’s a question she seldom had an answer for when she was his age: Where did you learn that?

Tonight she’ll find Lalli in his dream, and maybe they’ll be able to see the moose’s spirit returning to the stars. Onni, too. It will be a good thing for him to see.

“Come,” Ensi says when she and Lalli have both reached the foot of the tree. “Let’s find out what your father is making for dinner. But no noises in the forest, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Grandma,” says Lalli.

And he doesn’t make a single one, all the way home.


End file.
